Nigel Farage on why Ukip ‘will go on speaking up for common sense’

WHEN the history is written years from now of how Britain won back its sovereignty I predict that two names will be up at the top of the billing.

Nigel Farage addresses issues surrounding Ukip such as gay marriage and women in work [GETTY]

One will be Ukip, which even our sternest critics now concede has transformed the political landscape. The other will be the Daily Express, which has transformed the media landscape by becoming the first national newspaper to campaign to get Britain out of the European Union and restore this nation’s authority over its own borders.

We have fought shoulder to shoulder in recent years and have achieved a lot together already – with much more still to come.

So when the Daily Express gives voice to concerns about various recent events surrounding Ukip, I do not file it in a drawer marked “media smears” along with the attacks made on my party by those who have an agenda to do us down.

Rather I regard it as a message from a candid friend. So today I wish to answer the worries voiced yesterday in this newspaper’s leader column.

Let us start with the episode concerning town councillor David Silvester who has blamed the recent floods on David Cameron’s decision to bring in gay marriage. Mr Silvester is a decent and public-spirited man who was a Conservative for most of his political life.

He joined Ukip in the main because of his profound opposition to Mr Cameron’s gay marriage proposal. We in Ukip took issue with this proposal too because neither the Conservatives nor Labour nor the Liberal Democrats included it in their election manifestos. Instead they railroaded it through without bothering to first obtain a mandate, treating the views of opponents with disdain.

Hundreds of Tories, including Christians who take their scripture seriously, came to Ukip as a result of David Cameron’s handling of this issue. Now I do not agree with Mr Silvester’s remarkable take on weather forecasting. I have even described it as being at the barmier end of opinion.

But I did not suspend his membership of Ukip because of views he is perfectly entitled to hold. Ukip is after all a broad church of free thinking people and I welcome that. I did so because he defied a request to stop broadcasting those views while knowing that Ukip’s name would inevitably be attached to them. In effect he was bringing our party into disrepute and we could not allow that to continue. So the party dealt with it.

In just the same way I dealt with the Godfrey Bloom issue in the autumn. Because dealing with these things is what a proper leader has to do. Perhaps Nick Clegg should take note. In Ukip we will never be a party that kow-tows to political correctness. But there are limits. And going round insulting large swathes of the electorate and in the process taking attention away from the serious political agenda is one of them.

Now I know some people have suggested that I was responsible for doing something similar this week when I talked about the role of women in the City of London. Well, I was asked a question and I answered it as honestly as I could. That is not being anti-female and nobody who has worked with me or seen the outstanding contribution that women have made to the rise of Ukip could honestly accuse me of that.

Working mothers need to be given more support in managing childcare [REX]

Indeed, most of our brilliant by-election results of recent years have been achieved by women candidates: Jane Collins in Barnsley and Rotherham, Margot Parker in Corby and Diane James in Eastleigh. In each case they were chosen not to fulfil some gender quota but strictly on merit. Ukip is run as a meritocracy and so was the business that I ran before becoming party leader.

Did I mention that yet? I know it is deeply unfashionable for a senior politician to be able to say this but I actually set up and ran a business. I employed people in the private sector and worried about meeting the payroll at the end of the month. There was no comfort blanket of taxpayer-funding or government grant. It was live on your wits and deliver for your clients or go under.

I know many Daily Express readers have been in the same boat. And that is why so many of you have so little time for the college kids who run the other parties. So I don’t need to take lessons from Harriet Harman about running a firm of brokers in the City. I don’t need to be told that all is wonderful for a small company when a key employee assumes primary childcare responsibilities for a new baby. Because it isn’t. Not in that line of work.

In our society couples nearly always decide that it is the woman who will take up those responsibilities for childcare. And therefore it is nearly always the woman who suffers the negative consequence for earning power and that is what I was referring to when I said I could not change biology. There may well be a compelling case for parents to share the childcare load more evenly – although that is a decision couples must take for themselves. There may be an equally strong case for government to give greater help to working mothers seeking to juggle their responsibilities.

But there is not a case for suppressing the truth. For pretending that every possible side-effect for an employer – particularly a small business – is positive. And I am not the sort of person to put political correctness ahead of the truth.

If that’s what you really want then you have plenty of alternatives to choose from among the college kids in Westminster. What you will continue to get from me and from Ukip is patriotism and basic common sense. I can’t do politics any other way.